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Mieville is a novelist and leftist, and brings both things to the table for this highly accessible and compelling history. He’s really excellent at showing the complexities involved, the diverse goals and political foundations even within the leftist camp. Mieville often talks in terms of left and right Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs, internationalists, etc. It’s also striking to note how often things could have changed so radically, in the months leading up to the final Bolshevik takeover. Worth noting, too, that Lenin was absent for most of the key events, including the February overthrow of the czar, but ended up with so much power anyway.
It’s really good history, folks, and it moves quickly.
I just ordered one of his books for a friend of mine:
I’ll get the October book when the used-book-price comes down a bit 🙂
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interview:https://www.believermag.com/issues/200504/?read=interview_mievilleBLVR: How does a self-described “actual, genuine Trotskyist” connect with readers in a market where in our recent presidential election, our left candidate had to tap dance to prove he was sufficiently warmongering and religious?
CM: I think describing Kerry as “left” is sadly inaccurate. Well, you’ve got to remember, I’m not a leftist trying to smuggle in my evil message by the nefarious means of fantasy novels. I’m a science fiction and fantasy geek. I love this stuff. And when I write my novels, I’m not writing them to make political points. I’m writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I’m creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. But I never let them get in the way of the monsters. Now that was slightly different with Iron Council, because I had the sense for some years that I wanted to write a third book that operates as a culmination, which was overtly political and precisely about my kind of politics in this world that I’ve created. So it was a book that was, if you like, deeply structured with politics, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a manifesto, that doesn’t mean that it’s an argument disguised as a novel, because even though those politics are central, I know that as a novelist I want to tell a story, and that means that I have to have characters that are engaging. Even if you don’t agree with my politics or don’t give a shit about them, the story has to be engaging. And that’s the great thing about big, political radical movements. For instance, if you read about the Paris Commune, whether or not you agree with the position of the Communards, the Paris Commune is a tremendously exciting story. What I tried to do is write something which works as an exciting story but which treats the politics seriously. All of which is a long-winded way of saying I’ve never had any problems with the American market, because I don’t think I’m patronizing or condescending to readers or trying to convince them of a particular political line. I’m trying to say I’ve invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that to, that’s fantastic. But if not, isn’t this a cool monster?
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